As I continue to familiarize myself with the The MIKE2.0 Framework, one thing has become entirely apparent to me: it’s based in large part on having the right resources at the right time. In this very important sense, the MIKE2.0 Framework is the same as any other methodology for implementing new systems. In a new series of post, I’ll discuss some of the biggest mistakes that organizations make during information management projects (IM). In this post, I’ll cover timing as it relates to allocating resources.

Hurry Up and Wait

When I’m not writing, speaking, or chasing down tennis or golf balls, I’m typically on a consulting project. Like many people, I’m a hired gun available on a first-come, first-served basis. While there are certainly exceptions, most large organizations tend to struggle locking people like me down.

Consider the following example. Back in early June of this year, a firm for which I regularly subcontract (call it BU2B here) recently submitted me for a one year project for a large new system implementation. I didn’t hear anything for two months and assumed that either the project never started or that I wasn’t chosen. C’est la vie, right?

Wrong.

Fast forward to August 17th. I get a call from a recruiter at BU2B that its client needs to talk to me–today. Forget the fact that I am on site, billing my current client. BU2B tells me that this call has to happen today. I explain that that’s just not possible but that I’ll be free on the 18th for pretty much the entire day. Long story short: it has to be the 17th, even at night. Unable to make a firm commitment with a “burning plank” deadline, I have to pass.

Of course, this begs the questions:

• Why wait two months to find key resources for such an important project?
• What was going to be decided at 8:30 pm on Tuesday that couldn’t be decided at 8:30 am on Wednesday?
• Why would an organization wait two months and then give a candidate two hours? Does this seem reasonable?
• Does an organization really think that it’s getting the right or best resource with such a tight time line?
• If this is the way that this company operates, would I really want to get on a plane every week and go there?

Trust me. This isn’t sour grapes talking. I’m very comfortable with rejection, especially since I went to a 70 percent male college. But does this story sound familiar?

Simon Says

Don’t wait until the last minute to find consultants and contractors, particularly as your project approaches key dates. Follow these guidelines and you can maximize the chance of a smooth transition and minimize the chance of scurrying at the last moment:

• Let everyone know well ahead of time when projects are supposed to begin
• Lock down resources well before those key dates
• Identify backups just in case stuff happens
• If an extension is necessary for an existing resource, attempt to arrange this as early as possible. Don’t wait until Friday morning to see if a key person is available on Monday.
• By all means, don’t complain when that resource has found another gig

Information technology implementations collectively cost organizations billions of dollars per year, yet most of these ventures fail to meet management expectations. 

Much of the project success rides on user adoption, therefore an employee change management plan is a critical (and often overlooked) step.  By not having a formal change management plan and training program, you are setting the project- as well as your employees- up for failure.  

Below are some simple and key items to factor into your change management plan:

Communication: It is important to create appropriate communications channels and clearly relay the need for and benefits of the new system or program with employees.   The more they understand why the system is needed and how it will help make their job easier, the more receptive they will be to it.

Engagement: Create an environment that invites input from employees and solicit their suggestions BEFORE and WHILE designing and implementing the new system.  This is especially important for those employees who will be using the system on a daily basis, as they will be most impacted and will have a stronger reaction to accept or reject it.  Employees need to feel like they are part of the process and have a voice, so give them one.

Training: Set aside time to train your employees how to use the new system before they actually need to use it for day-to-day operations.  If the training is rushed, employees will not be comfortable with it and are more likely to become frustrated with it. 

Feedback: Create a straightforward, no hassle process for receiving and implementing user feedback and improvement suggestions.  Chances are you will need to rework and refine the program/system many times until it begins running smoothly.

Including these items in your change management plan will help employees feel included, informed, engaged and empowered and they will be more likely to welcome the new system and use it as it was intended.

A Natural Synergy Between MIKE2.0 and the Semantic Enterprise

A recent post, “‘Pay as You Benefit‘: A New Enterprise IT Strategy,” describes an incremental approach to new information development activities premised on low-risk, affordable deployment chunks. The strategy is based on MIKE2.0’s Semantic Enterprise composite solution offering, and is a natural expression of MIKE2.0’s incremental deployment methodology. The strategy is especially well suited to the areas of information and knowledge management and information integration.

The pivotal difference in the ‘Pay as You Benefit‘ strategy is a shift from a closed world to an open world approach. Not only does this shift negate past IT hurdles of completeness and comprehensiveness — which have raised the stakes for IT initiatives for decades and are arguably a root cause of many failed projects — but it also is more suitable for enterprises needing to integrate outside information. Open world approaches can also comfortably embrace closed world ones, while the inverse is not true.

See further the full posting on the AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, a new addition to this site’s blogroll.

During the 1980s I remember reading for many years in a row that networks were going to be the next big thing.  So much so, that it became easy to become cynical about their potential.  Similarly, many people (including myself) have been talking about XBRL for far too many years, but maybe, just maybe it is starting to come of age.

XBRL (or eXtensible Business Reporting Language to the uninitiated) is a standardised way of communicating business information such as financial statements, regulatory submissions and internal reports.  By using a standard language, you get all of the benefits of any information standard.  The benefits include the interoperability of software, transparency of business rules, simplicity of data aggregation and simplified analysis.  The requirement to learn a new language and the lack of supporting software has, to-date, put many businesses off.

While there have been a number of trials, including most famously the SEC in the United States, I think it is worthwhile to take a few minutes to look at the latest initiative from the Australian Government: Standard Business Reporting (www.sbr.gov.au).  The new SBR website is slick (at least for a government site!) and explains the benefits and initiative well.  It will be exciting to see whether SBR achieves its aims to change business reporting in Australia.

In August of last year I was asked to write an article for the end-of-year issue of Information Age about what I thought was important in 2010.  As we all know, the last year has been tumultuous and predicting what was important in the next month has been hard enough let alone predicting the next year.

Nonetheless, I’m always up for a challenge, wrote the article and then promptly forgot about it.  When the magazine came out, I was curious to re-read what I’d written.  The theme of the article was a focus on agility in the face of uncertainty.  This is easy to say, but writing for the CIO audience I emphasised that in tough times business tries to reduce cost (which means focusing on efficiency of existing processes) and defend against market events (which means emergency system changes).  Neither of these trends generally leads to flexible business systems.

In the article I suggest the demand that will come during the recovery will be unpredictable, making life for the reactive CIO almost impossible.  I used books which many non-technology executives will have read (The Black Swan and Predictably Irrational) to help CIOs to make the case to focus on the data asset.

The article is available online: Information Age (Agile on the rebound).

Well thought through online strategies can do so much more than deliver high quality web sites for internal and external users. They can dramatically improve some of your business fundamentals. There are few things more fundamental than the quality of your data.

When people think of data quality they often focus first on customer data. One of the best ways to ensure that customer data is right is to provide a way for your own customers to update their details online. On its own, this is an important capability, but to be really effective it needs to be linked to something that the customer regularly does on the web, such as reviewing their accounts, orders or other interactions with your organisation. Truly effective businesses make updating customer details part of every interaction and available to all stakeholders in the customer, effectively building a Facebook-like facility for their customers identifying relationships (friends), preferences and activities.

Apart from enhanced customer service, it is worth remembering that it is much harder to maintain a fraudulent identify when you are connected through multiple relationships and you have to maintain an exponential number of fronts.

Business data includes much more than just customer details. Online collaboration both inside and outside the enterprise can enhance almost all data in some way. One of the most common problems businesses face is maintaining an accurate understanding of the definition of complex business terminology. Every organisation develops their own language and expects staff, customers and business partners to understand it. Worse, few maintain a dictionary of this language.

Consider creating such a dictionary, with components that are visible internally, other parts to business partners and a relevant subset to the world in general. To really leverage the power of the web, make this dictionary readily updatable (even using a wiki). While open to misuse, it is unlikely that internal staff or business partners who are easily traced will deliberately abuse the privilege. Online communities have shown that complex topics attract genuinely interested contributors who can often provide a better explanation to their peers that you could hope to publish either from an insight or simple labour perspective.

Finally having learnt to use the web to better maintain customer data and your data dictionary, it rapidly becomes obvious that many datasets would be candidates to be open to a wider community for monitoring, comment or even enhancement. Consider lists of branches, community contacts and products. In the last case, suppliers sometimes make changes which flow through your supply chain without being updated in online catalogues.

If there is one thing we’ve learnt, the fear that we feel about opening our content up for collaboration is often disproportionate to the real risk of misuse. If you succumb to this fear without carefully considering what you are worried about, then you’ll miss out on the power that the crowd can bring to our business.

Readers interested in these concepts should read further about the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and Information Management in MIKE2.0, in particular the MIKE2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Solution Offering.

As I described in my last post, the quantity of information being generated globally and within each of our organisations is absolutely overwhelming.  All good managers facing a large problem start by trying to break the task down into manageable pieces.  The question information managers face is what is the right starting point for breaking enterprise information into such manageable pieces.  I’ve seen organisations start with technology (structured database, records, documents, email, HTML etc.).  I’ve seen others start by the subject being covered (customer, finance, human resources, product etc.).

A better approach is to ask how the information is used by the business.  Over many years, I have come to the conclusion that there are four ways that information is used.

The first use is the measurement of performance from executive to operations (for example the Balanced Scorecard).  The second use is to navigate the organisation via location, product, staff, customer or other common concepts (for example Master Data or Dimensional Models).  The third is to describe the business in an abstract or atomic way (for example third normal form data models in the data warehouse or the Enterprise Content Management repository).  Finally, the fourth is the operational system data which sits in front of the customer or production-line process.

Readers who are interested in exploring these ideas further can read a more detailed article on the Four Layers of Information.

Richard Wray, writing recently in The Guardian, pointed out that the volume of data held is now estimated at 487 billion GB.  To put this in perspective he explained that in printed form this would form a pile that would stretch to Pluto 10 times over.  The really staggering statistic, however, was that if this data were printed then the stack would grow faster than NASA’s fastest rocket.  I haven’t checked the stats, but a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests he’s in the right order of magnitude.

What does this mean?  Apart from the staggering numbers, it tells us that the problem for organisations isn’t holding large amounts of information – they already do that.  Nor is the problem necessarily how to index that information – increasingly they have defined information standards to do that.  The real problem is its continual growth – very few taxonomies or models properly account for the rapid rate of growth.

MIKE2.0 hosts a new generation of Information Management techniques which are designed to deal less with the data you have now and more with the data that you are likely to gain in the future.   A great place to start is with the SAFE architecture.

It’s tough out there if you’re trying to kick off a critical information management program. Whereas most clients I speak with want to significantly improve their capability in how they manage information, they find it tough to get funding for major programs of work This is where I believe some real benefits come through for MIKE2.0 – you can still get a comprehensive, highly relevant approach more quickly though reuse of the framework:

You can use the approach to drive cost reduction, through a comprehensive approach for:
• Technology and system consolidation
• Alignment of common information management programs
• Operational efficiency through better data quality and efficiency

You can reuse free content and improve delivery quality:
• A common, open framework that can be reused across all your projects
• A common, open framework for external providers
• Free collaboration technology

You can build momentum for your priority business initiatives:
• Make sure you have a fact-based business case
• Improve data and analytical capabilities to meet new business demands
• Prepare for major changes related to merger integration

I find businesses will spend money these days on information management – you just need a strong “case for change”. To read more, check out the extreme blueprinting and roadmapping approach to building a transformational IM strategy and some recent Case Studies.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maria Villar at the IBM’s Information on Demand Conference where she presented on her new book – Managing Your Business Data. Its a great book for someone looking to make the “case for change” for treating information as an asset across the enterprise, building a culture of better information management and establishing roles and responsibilities for better data management across the organization.  There’s a wealth of information in there – and its something a business leader can understand just as well as a technologist. I particularly liked blending the conceptual (Maslow’s needs hierarchy for data management) with the pragmatic (lots of cases studies).

Maria tells me the book will be on Amazon soon but in the meantime you can order direct from the publisher at the link above.